The Debian Project includes many people, groups and teams with different goals, priorities and ways of doing things. Diversity is a good thing, and the results of the continuous interaction, cooperation and competition among different points of view and components make up a successful developing framework both in Debian and in other Free / Libre / Open Source Software communities.

The cost of this evolutionary paradigm is that sometimes there are subprojects that might have been extremely successful and useful that are surpassed by newer approaches, or that have to compete with alternative approaches that were not there before, and which might pursue different goals or have a different way of doing things that their developers find preferable in terms of modularity, scalability, stability, maintenance, aesthetics or any other reason.

Whenever this happens, the emotional impact on the person or group of people that are behind the established component (or process, or organizational structure), that is being questioned and put under test by the newer approach can be important, particularly when they have invested a lot of time and effort and a considerable amount of emotional energy doing a great job for many years. Something they should be thanked for.

This might be particularly hard when -for whatever reason- the communication between both teams is not too fluent or constant, and sometimes the author or authors of the solution that was considered mainstream until then might feel left out and their territory stolen. As generally development teams and technical people in the Free / Libre / Open Source world are more focused on results than on relationships, projects are generally not too good at managing this (emotional, relational) situations, even though they (we) are gradually learning and improving.

What has happened with the Debian Live Project is indeed a hurtful situation, even though it’s probably an unavoidable one. The Debian Live Project has done a great job for many years and it is sad to see it dying abruptly. A new competing approach is on its way with a different set of priorities and different way of doing things, and all that can be done at the moment is to thank Daniel for all his work, as well as everyone who has made the Debian Live Project successful for so many years, also thank the people who are investing their time and effort in developing something that might be even better. Lets wait and see.

The definition of “thick-skinned” in different dictionaries ranges from “not easily offended” to “largely unaffected by the needs and feelings of other people; insensitive”, going through “able to ignore personal criticism”, “ability to withstand criticism and show no signs of any criticism you may receive getting to you”, “an insensitive nature” or “impervious to criticism”. It essentially describes an emotionally detached attitude regarding one’s social environment, the capacity or ignoring or minimizing the effects of others’ criticism and the priorization of the protection of one’s current state over the capacity of empathizing and taking into account what others may say that don’t conform to one’s current way of thinking. It is essentially setting up barriers against whatever others may do that might provoke any kind of crisis or change in you.

There are a few underlying assumptions in the use of this term as a something good to have, when it comes to interactions with your own community:

In the first place, it assumes that your own community is essentially hostile to you, and you will have to be constantly in guard against them. It assumes that it is better to set up barriers against the influence of others within your own comunity, because in fact your own peers are out there essentially to hurt you. Or, at least, they do not care a damn about you.

In second place, it assumes that changes are wrong, that personal evolution is wrong, and that the more insensitive you are to your peer’s opinions, the best, because they really have nothing to contribute to help you grow as a person. “I’m smart; you’re dumb. I’m big; you’re little. I’m right; you’re wrong; And there’s nothing you can do about it.” (from the film Matilda). Matilda’s dad is in fact the first reference that comes to my mind when we’re talking about really thick skin.

When the main recommendation when the level of aggressiveness within a community is that someone has to make their skin thicker, they are assuming that a bullying environment will help the results. This is nothing new. It’s the same theoretical base that you can see in hazing and in other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation in college, when initiating a person into some groups. It’s supposed to build character, to make someone closer to the alpha male stereotype and, in essence, make us ‘better men’ (yes, I am using the word men on purpose, because insensitiveness is not usually seen as a positive trait in females). The assumption is that a community with a hard environment and individuals prepared for the war is more effective than a more civilized one.

Luckily, that’s not the point of view of most members of the Debian Community, and many other Free/Open Source projects. The Code of Conduct is very explicit when it says that “a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community”, and that is good. ” The Debian Project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone” (Diversity Statement), including those with a thin skin, and I’m happy about that. There are still a lot of things to improve, of course, but I have the feeling that -despite the occasional complains that having to be respectful to others take the fun away- we’re moving in the right direction.

“The best tip I can give you on thickening your skin = don’t. That is, don’t thicken your skin. Having a thin skin means you’re letting the world in, you’re letting what’s out there affect what’s in you. It means you’re connected. You’re open. You’re considerate and you’ll consider it — whatever it might be. Having a thin skin may be dangerous, sure, because you might take in so much that you pop, like that blueberry girl from Willy Wonka. But life is dangerous. A thick skin protects you from everything, but it also protects you from everything — from the gentle touches of life, from the subtle emotions of others, the deep connections, the meaningful interactions.” (Top Ten Tips on how to Thicken your Skin).

I approached the SuperTuxKart community fearing some backslash due to last week’s discussion about their release 0.9, to find instead a nice, friendly and welcoming community. I have already had some very nice talks with them since then, and they have patiently explained to me the sequence of events that led to the situation that I mentioned and that, for the sake of fairness, I consider that I have to share here too. You can read the log of the first conversation I had with them (the log has been edited and cleared up for clarity and readability). I seriously recommend reading it, it’s a honest friendly conversation, and it’s first hand.

For those who don’t already know the game:

All this story seems to start with the complain of a 6 yo girl, close relative of one of the developers and STK user, who explained that she always felt that Mario Kart was better because there was a princess in it. I’m not particularly happy with princesses as role models for girls, but one thing I have always said is that we have to listen to kids and take their opinions into accounts, and I know that if I had such a request from one of the kids closer to me, I probably would have fulfilled it too. In any case, Free Software projects based on volunteer work are essentially a do-ocracy and it is assumed that whoever does the work, gets to decide about it.

So that is how Princess Sara was added to the game. While developing it, I was assured that they took extra care that her proportions were somehow realistic, and not as distorted as we’re used to see in Barbie or many Disney films. Sara is inspired on an OpenGameArt’s wizard and is not supposed to be a weak damsel in distress, but in fact a powerful character in the world’s universe.

Sara is not the only female character playable. There are a few others: Suzanne (a monkey, Blender’s mascot), Xue (XFCE’s mouse) and Amanda (a panda, the mascot of windows maker). Sara happens to be the only human character playable, male or female. While it has been argued that by adding that character, a player might have the impression that the rest of the characters would be male by default, I have been told that the intention is exactly the opposite,and that the fact that the only human playable character in the game is female should make it more attractive to girls. To some, at least.

Here are some images of Sara:

So the fact is that they have invested a lot of time in developing Sara’s model. I’m not an artist myself, so I don’t know first hand how much time and effort it takes to make such a model, but in any case it seems that quite a lot. When they designed the beach track Gran Paradiso, they wanted to add people to the beach. That track is, in fact, inspired on a real existing place: Princess Juliana Airport. Time was over and they wanted to publish a version with what they already had, so they used Sara’s model in a bikini on the beach, with the intention of adding more people, male and female, later. The overall view of the beach would be:

This is how that track shows when the players are driving in it:

Now, about the poster of version 0.9, it is supposed to be inspired in the previous poster of version 0.8.1, only this time inspired in Carnival (which is, in fact, a celebration in which sexualization of both genders is a core part). I know that there are accusations of cultural apropriation, but I couldn’t know, as my white privilege probably shields me from seeing that. Up to now, no one has said anything about that, only Gunnar explaining his point of view as a non-native mexican: “While the poster does not strike as the most cautious possible, I do not see it as culturally offensive. It does not attempt to set a scene portraiting what were the cultures really like; the portrait it paints is similar to so many fantasy recreations”. In my opinion, even when the model is done in good taste, with no superbig breasts and no unrealistic waist, it’s still depicting a girl without much clothes as the main element of the scene, with an attire, a posture and an attitude that clearly resembles carnival and, thus, inevitably conveys a message of sexualization. Even though I can’t deny that it’s a cute poster, it’s one I wouldn’t be happy to see for example in a school, if someone wanted to promote the game there.

The author of the poster, anyway, tells me that he had a totally different intention when doing it, and he wanted to depict a powerful princess, in the center of SuperTuxKart’s universe, celebrating the new engine.

About the panties showing every now and then, I’ve been told that it’s something so hard to see that in fact you would really have to open the model itself to view them. I’m not saying that I like them though, I think it would have been better if Sara would have had short pants under the skirt, if she was going to drive the snowmobile with a dress, but I’m not sure if that’s something important enough to condemn the game. The original girl mentioned at the beginning of this post seems to have found the animation funny, started laughing, and said that Sara is very silly, and that was all. It’s probably something more silly than naughty, I guess. Even though, as I said, it’s something I don’t like too much. I don’t have to agree with STK developers in everything. I guess.

There’s one thing I would like to highlight about my conversations with the developers of SuperTuxKart, though. I like them. They seem to be as concerned about the wellbeing of kids as I am, they have their own ethic norms of what’s acceptable and what’s not, and they want to do something to be proud of. Sometimes, many of these conflicts arise from a lack of trust. When I first saw the screenshots with the girl in bikini and the panties showing, I was honestly concerned about the direction the project was taking. After having talked with the developers, I am more calmed about it, because they seem to have their heart in the right place, they care, they are motivated and they work hard. I don’t know if a princess would be my first choice for a main female character, but at least their intention seems to be to give some girls a sensible role model in the game with who they can identify.

It has been recently discussed in Debian-Women and Debian-Games mailing lists, but for all of you who don’t read those mailing lists and might have kids or use free games with kids in the classroom, or stuff like that, I thought it might be good to talk about it here.

SuperTuxKart is a free 3D kart racing game, similar to Mario Kart, with a focus on having fun over realism. The characters in the game are the mascots of free and open source projects, except for Nolok, who does not represent a particular open source project, but was created by the SuperTux Game Team as the enemy of Tux.

On April 21, 2015, version 0.9 (not yet in Debian) was released which used the Antarctica graphics engine (a derivative of Irrlicht) and enabled better graphics appearance and features such as dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion, depth of field, and global illumination.

Along with this new engine comes a poster with a sexualized white woman is wearing an outfit that can be depicted as a mix of Native american clothes from different nation and a halo of feathers, as well as many models of her in a bikini swim suit, all along the game, even in the hall of the airport.

In the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. (Can’t lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.) Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.

Ah, those poor nave innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad thay don’t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.

Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I’ve been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.

Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines–especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.

Don’t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn’t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts….

A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stamp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty is was. She then told them to tell it they’re sorry. Now even though they said they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bullies another child, they may say they’re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home.

Even though the Wikipedia defines “gamer” as “someone who partakes in interactive gaming, such as (predominantly) video games or board games”, this doesn’t really gets close to that term means socially at the moment. Going back to Wikipedia, we find that the video game subculture is “a form of new media subculture that has been influenced by video games”, so it might be quite accurate to define gamers as members of that subculture. You will find that most of the uses of the term “gamer” in the social networks and in the blogosphere refer to that. Please notice that, even though it is quite likely that most of the gamers play video games, the other way round does not need to be true and, in fact, it isn’t. Not everyone who plays video games belongs to the video game subculture, shares their point of view, their values and aesthetics, or even know about it. Kind of like what happens with the word “hacker”. Not everyone who hacks around with a computer belongs to the hacker subculture.

Mostly everyone who has access to the technology plays video games now. From babies and kids to grandparents. And people play them in every possible technological system around, not only on video game consoles or personal computers, but alse on mobile phones, tablets, web browsers. And many of those people who use different kind of technologies to play video games are not gamers. Not in the sense of belonging to the video game subculture. It is important to acknowledge that: that the video game subculture does not have the monopoly over video games or the video game developing industry anymore.

As you can imagine, all this rand doesn’t come from nowhere. During the last months, we have been witnessing a fight between some conservative core members of the video game subculture and people who want to bring some fresh air into the sociocultural elements of that subculture. Namely, that women shouldn’t be discriminated inside it. As every time that a women raises her voice to complain about anything in the Internet, they have been subjected to insults, attacks, rape and death threats, etc. I’m talking about something called #GamerGate, and even though I’m not going to get into it, I will provide some URLs in case someone might be interested. Please acknowledge that not all the points of view might be represented in this list (in fact, they are not, as I won’t be promoting in my blog things that I severely disagree with), so search the web for more information if you want to get that.

I’ve never been a gamer myself, meaning part of the subculture I mentioned. At some point I was probably closer tho the core values they had then than I am now. In any case, video games have already consolidated themselves as an important part of current culture, entertainment, education and socialization, and are definitely here to stay. That will probably mean that the percentage of gamers (members of the video game subculture) will become smaller. as the number of non-gamer video game players keeps raising.

I have just uploaded a newer version of Löveto Debian, 0.9.0. As usual, this version breaks compatibility with the API of previous versions. Literally: “LÖVE 0.9.0 breaks compatibility with nearly every 0.8.0 game“. It’s a hard to fix situation from a package maintainer’s point of view, at least until they agree on a stable API, hopefully in a 1.0 version sometime. Löve has been in Debian official repositories since 2008.

As major changes, we can see that it’s using SDL2 and LuaJIT now. Depending on where the bottlenecks were in some of the demos and games, the performance might have improved a lot. The improvements have been a lot, and the structure of the API is more consistent and clean. Congratulations to everyone that has made it possible.

On the bitter part, well, most of the previous games and demos will most likely not work any more without some changes in the code. As we don’t have any reverse dependencies in the archive (yet), this won’t cause any severe problems. But, of course, Debian is not an isolated island, and people might need to execute some old code without being able to migrate it.

I have prepared some packages for older versions of Löve that might make the situation more bearable for some, until code is migrated to the new API. These versions can be co-installed with the latest version in the archive (0.9.0). I’m not sure if it will be needed, but if it was, I might consider putting previous 0.8 version in the official repositories. I would prefer not to do it, though, as that would make me the de facto maintainer of the upstream code, as Löve community is moving forwards with newer versions.

The first time I found this cute game, was around 2009, but for a bunch of reasons I haven’t been able to get it into the archive until now. Pink Pony is a cute game in which you have to control a pink pony who’s main goal is to last in the game more time than the other ponies. You might remember the game Tron, or the film, in which there were light cycles who left a trace behind, with which the other cycles crashed. Well, this is the similar game concept, only with cute ponies instead of light cycles. You can see a video of the game in action, if you want to get a feeling of how it is.

Thomas Weber (Ginko), has published a newer version of the game (1.3.1) a couple of days ago, and that is the one that has entered Debian repositories (sid) today. Thanks, Ginko, for this lovely game!

Even though the game might not seem too appealing for some of the adult users of Debian or Ubuntu, maybe some of their kids will like it as much as I do. The game is quite quick, though, so very young kids might have trouble controlling the pony. I would suspect it might be all right for kids above 9 years old, but I haven’t been able to test my hypothesis, so if you find out, please tell me